Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019) was an internationally recognized and pathbreaking art curator, the former director of Haus der Kunst, founder of
How to understand the strange becoming-animal of human figures in the art of Cobra, the Northern European artists movement? In a 1948 manifesto, the Dutch artist Constant frames the postwar situation, in dialectical terms, as a “total collapse” that might permit a “new freedom,” as long as artists “find their way back to the first point of origin of creative activity.” To this end Constant delivers a striking formula: “A painting is not a construction of colors and lines, but an animal, a night, a scream, a human being, or all of these.” This intimates that the creaturely is a cipher of the confused aftermath of the war—of a “broken down” condition in which “limitations … are dissolved.” It is the Danish Asger Jorn who, above all others, rises to this challenge, writing, “We must portray ourselves as human beasts.”
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